New passwd/group handling in Cygwin - test results and observations

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Corinna Vinschen!

> This week I applied the first incarnation of the new passwd/group
> handling code to the Cygwin repository and after fixing a crash which
> manifested in Denis Excoffier's network, I think we're at a point
> which allows to push this forward.

Oookaaaay... What to say about it?...
First impression is "oh my god, did I bought a new rig?"

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 daemon2 1.7.29s(0.271/5/3) 20140213 14:06:26 i686 Cygwin

mintty startup is almost instant. Same with diff in native console.
I have no idea, what you did, I don't even have a good explanation of why it
happened. My /etc/passwd is about 1.5kb, half that - /etc/group.

I only dumped new cygwin1.dll into place and not changed anything else.
I'm going to run unattended tests just to prove I'm not dreaming.

HOWEVER, here's a first bug. Actually, it was a long standing issue, that
I've been discarding as nonessential, but since you are here already, can we
have a bit of attention?

The issue can be observed when you have a user or group name containing
characters outside basic ASCII character set. Even western diacritics will
suffice.

Add somewhere in your startup files an equivalent of the following block:
(I have it in private .profile)

---->8-------->8-------->8-------->8-------->8-------->8-------->8----
case "$TERM" in
  xterm*)
    LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
    ;;
  *)
    LANG=ru_RU.CP866
    ;;
esac

export PATH HISTCONTROL LANG
----8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<----

restart your shell, and try to ls -l a directory, where you have files owned
by abovementioned user/group.

Try it in mintty(the encoding will be UTF-8 and names will show up readable)
and in native console (with appropriate single-byte encoding, the names will
still be printed in unicode, means, raw byte sequences will be dumped to
terminal).
I though it could be affected by the fact I'm changing LANG on the fly, but
starting bash in a console that initially have correct LANG= variable doesn't
change observed results.


--
WBR,
Andrey Repin (anrdaemon@yandex.ru) 14.02.2014, <01:50>

Sorry for my terrible english...


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